Otakukin

[mindstalk]

I would like to go on the record as thinking that otakukin -- people who believe their set of past lives include fictional characters -- are not, in fact, crazier than your more mainstream religious or spiritual types. The invocation of parallel universes, time-travelling souls, or Dreaming-type planes needed to have the idea make some sort of sense is not crazier than the Christian Trinity who is outside of time and loves us infinitely but will send many of us to Hell for using a condom, and who decided to wait for 95% of the history of the human race before letting anyone know about this. Or who made the world 6000 years ago so as to look 4.5 billion years old. Then there's the body and blood of Christ of the Catholics, or the Protestant necessity to believe that the miracles of the Gospels are real, but not the miracles of the Catholic saints. Nor crazier than the Hindu who thinks vast mathematical and scientific truths are encoded in the Vedas. And I've never gotten neo-Paganism to make sense to me (actually, I've never quite learned what they do believe) while I figured out one otakukin justification in a flash on my own.

And as ideas ago it's a lot less morally ugly than Orthodox Jews going on about how the Torah condemns buttsex and gives them eternal title to the land of Israel or the Rapture Ready Christians hoping the world ends real soon now.

One of the communities has posts which don't seem any dumber than Christians I've seen recently going on about their faiths, and let's not go into the vicious defensiveness of some otherkin ("Hi! I'm an elf!")

Keep in mind I'm speaking as a hardcore empiricist/materialist, so "not crazier" is a rather low bar for me. But at least these people claim some sort of direct experience, rather than a "Bible is true because it's the word of God because it says so" faith-based closed loop. And hey, most fiction is better edited.

Comments

[anima-mecanique.livejournal.com]

I have this weird fondness for otakin. I'm not exactly sure why. Maybe because they seem to be less apt to scream OMG PERSECUTION when someone trolls their communities or makes fun of them on the internet, or maybe it's because they're prone to write extremely long, sort of entertaining justifications for why they think they're the reincarnation of Sephiroth.

It's soul-bonders that rub me the wrong way. They take an extraordinarily common phenomenon among writers and RP-ers -- thinking of your characters as seperate entities from you, with their own will, sometimes to the point of being able to carry on 'conversations' with them -- and claim that their ability to do this makes them incredibly special. Grh.

By the by, 'neo-paganism' is a blanket term for a large variety of mini-religions, from strict reconstructionist heathen-y folk to techno-pagans, with adherants ranging from the fluffiest girl-power unicorn-loving Wiccan to Neo-Nazis worshipping Norse gods as the true white man's religion (Christianity being too Jew-y, I guess). You're better off trying to figure out what each sub-set believes.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I was seeing mention of the soulbonders, but couldn't quite get what was up, and I'm way past rational bedtime as it is. I guessed it was something like psychic contact with the character. Oh, an otakin had a nice summary, if I can reconstruct it: soulbonding would be Character X screaming at human Y that "they got the anime wrong!" while otakukin was human Y (who is/was character X) screaming "you got the anime wrong". Anyway, by itself this seems no big deal compared to the otakin; once we're postulating semi-real fictional characters I'm not going to say contact or reincarnation is crazier.

But yeah, in that community at least the otakin seemed charmingly self-deprecating and self-aware, kind of like the liberal Christians at Making Light.

Yeah, neo-pagan as a big tent. I've run across "I'm just in it for the rituals" to vague hints of "my gods are real!" for various gods, just never delved too deeply into any of it. Also "I can really cast spells", where the poster meant not mental focusing or "raising energy" but real shapechanging. I think he criticized the Buffy show for showing shapechaning magic as being harder than protective magic. Or vice versa, it was years ago. He definitely felt they had the order wrong, though. Does my tolerance have limits? Sure does, right *there*.

[anima-mecanique.livejournal.com]

I know one or two otherkin and a couple of people who would probably call themselves that if they had had more access to the internet. Some of them seem to be into the otherkin subculture, and a couple of them have said that they avoid it because of the drama *shrug* I think there are MORE otherkin than there are otakin, so you get more people with a persecution complex.

Soulbonding just annoys me because it's a bunch of people claiming that their experience of their characters is far and above anyone else's experience of their characters, which strikes me as arrogant. They're probably not trying to be, but whatever. It's a personal impression. Yes, I have conversations with my characters in my head. Yes, my characters do really odd things that I'm not expecting. This is what characters DO.

Either that or I'm OMG secretly a soulbonder.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Oh, here's a question: do you know if is there much collective personality difference between the otherkin and the otakukin, apart from the tendency of some of the former to attack the latter? Did the otherkin seem like the otakin do now, before they got someone to revile in turn, or were they originally more apt to scream OMG PERSECUTION? Or are my questions too simplistic?

I'm wondering what's inherent to the communities themselves from their ideas, what comes along as small-population founder effects (because how big are these things?) and what's inherent to the position of the communities, i.e. bottom rung of the geek hierarchy vs. second from the bottom (none are so harsh on the poor as the lower middle class).

[elynne.livejournal.com]

I can't speak to Otakukin - I don't know any, or if I do, they haven't admitted it - but I know a bunchload of Otherkin (half-raises hand) and all I can say is that, like virtually everything else in life, it totally, utterly depends on the Otherkin in question, and to a large extent on where they hang out and who they listen to. Some Otherkin are very loudly defensive about everything; some (of us, I like to think) are quiet, laid-back, more than willing to discuss such stuff reasonably, and just as willing to simply walk away from what we percieve as strident hysteria, blatant trolling, or otherwise completely untenable situations.

Me, I think that Otakukin... how to put it politely. I think they've jumped to conclusions, generally speaking. I do know that, on the one hand, wish-fulfilment is an extremely powerful drive for us humans, and we're willing to jump through seriously crazy hoops to feel like we belong, safe and wanted. On the other hand, regardless of your faith, real spiritual understanding is a long, difficult, not always sparkly fluffy bunny journey; it takes fucking years, and you'll never really know until you die (maybe), and you have to be willing to boldly and honestly question your bedrock assumptions. But, y'know... easier to say "I'm a reincarnation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer!", just as it's easier to say "Jesus loves me and His blood will save me from Eternal Damnation (TM)!" or "Allah knows everything in His infinite wisdom and has assigned me a place at His side in Paradise (TM)!" or whatever else.

So, I guess it can be summed up that I think that Otakukin are in general latching on to "easy" explanations, and wallowing in their own imaginations, rather than... doing that other thing, you know. With the thinking. And stuff.

For bonus fun, I give my religion as Polypantheistic Zen Discordian agnostic, which roughly translates that I may or may not believe in a variety of different gods simultaneously, and I'm not sure it matters anyway. I put great value in personal experience, because that's ultimately all I have to go on, and I've had personal experiences that lend credence to some fairly wacky idea(r)s; but I wouldn't say that it's anything that would, fr'ex, convince Randi enough to part with a big wad of cash, or that couldn't be explained by a combination of coincidence, a very active imagination, and the Power of Wishful Thinking (TM).

... I'm sleepy. :P

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Not that I want to get into an argument about a subculture I don't know much about, but a journey of years and questioning assumptions don't seem inconsistent with some of the otakin stories I was reading last night. And digging new pits in the geek hierarchy hardly seems like the easy way out. Some of them seem to be independent re-inventions, too, along the lines of "oh, there are others like me" rather than "ooh, cool idea, I'll be an otakukin too!"

Basically they, talking about themselves, sounded like any other spiritual seeker, (in my admittedly limited experience) but talking about being Inuyasha instead of having God in their heart. And my reaction is that the crazy starts the minute you walk past public empiricism into private empiricism (unshareable experience) or worse, pure faith. In those areas all you can judge by is logical consistency and effect on their lives and behavior, and they seem to come out pretty well there.

Plus I don't see why spiritual journeys have to be long and difficult. What's wrong with having instant revelations? I don't fetishize difficulty, only testability, and that's been left way behind.

Having read Sandman and played Changeling is probably a big prep for me; a notion of a Dreaming eases the whole "fictional characters are real" thing.